But it hadn’t lasted. It wouldn’t do. Never risking anything meant never having or doing or being anything either. Life is risk, it turned out. Eliot and Janet and Julia had come for him, and he’d gone back to Fillory after all. He’d risked again, and won, and lost, and it hurt but he didn’t regret it, not any of it.

“You’re wrong,” Quentin said. “Fine, you’re a genius, but you’re wrong about this. You could go back. It wouldn’t be as bad as you think.”

“Do not tell me what I can do. Do not tell me who I am. When you can do all this, little man, then you can judge me.”

“I’m not judging you. I’m just saying—”

“You—you are not such a mystery.” Mayakovsky jabbed Quentin in the chest with a finger like a dried sausage. “You think I do not know you? They threw you out of that place, that other world you go to. Yes? And you came back to Brakebills. But they would not have you there either! So out you go again!”

Jesus, he must know about Fillory, or at least the Neitherlands. Mayakovsky advanced on Quentin, who gave ground.

“Well, yeah,” Quentin said. “But you’ll notice I’m not hanging around my ice castle brooding about it.”

“No! No! Now you want to be a criminal! But even that is too much! You have to come running to Daddy, begging for help!”

“My dad’s dead.”

Quentin stopped backing up.

“I may be a second-rate magician,” he said, “but at least I’m not a weird recluse who yells at people. I’m out in the world trying to get something done. And I’ll tell you something else, I think you know how to break an incorporate bond. In fact”—oh my God, maybe he actually was a genius—“in fact, I think you’re under one yourself. That’s what’s keeping you here. Isn’t it?”

Mayakovsky had been very well prepared for their visit. Too well, even for him. It was a long shot—but Mayakovsky hesitated, and Quentin knew he was close.

“Tell me how to break it.” He pressed his advantage. “You must have figured it out, even if you’re too scared to do it yourself. Tell me how. Help somebody for a change!”

He’d touched a nerve, because something went cold behind Mayakovsky’s eyes, and he slapped Quentin across the face. Quentin had forgotten how he liked to do that. It stung like hell, though not as much as it would have if he hadn’t already been drunk on lichen vodka. It made his ears ring, but his face was already two-thirds numb.